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What is Google doing with its open source teams?

theregister.com

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Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#61

Post by phpisthebest »

mike_d wrote: post #43
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should tell AWS about that race to the bottom while they continue to produce a majority of Amazon's profit.

Advertising is way more profitable than AWS. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasongoldberg/2022/02/04/amazon...

That is based on huge assumptions, and it is unclear how the internal billing works (i.e is the Ad business consuming AWS services "free" or is there internal chargebacks happening). Is the AWS Revenue just from external customers using the services.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#62

Post by zdragnar »

bombolo wrote: post #42
pm90 wrote: post #7

It will be interesting to see amazing talent leave Google and build new companies and institutions now that it’s slowly being mismanaged to death.

This can only happen with funding. Is this available lately?

It's not exactly an open tap, but there's definitely still funding to be found.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#63

Post by doktorhladnjak »

radlad wrote: post #55
doktorhladnjak wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Microsoft during the Ballmer era. Profits and revenue continued to increase under his watch. They did invest in mobile from fairly early. Microsoft was selling smart phones (through third party manufacturers) in the early 2000s. They just executed very poorly on mobile by building the wrong thing for the wrong customers. By the time leadership figured this out and started to pour money into Windows Phone,…

> Then they ditched that app platform for a new one in Windows Phone 7, losing what little they had. Companies that had built apps for iPhone and Android had no incentive doing so on Windows at that point. I remember this basically as around the time that Microsoft bought Nokia and produced some really nice looking phones that people were excited about... they had also just reinvented their app platform and nothing c…

The new app platform happened maybe a couple years before the Nokia acquisition. I don’t remember the whole timeline but don’t forget Steven Elop (who had been the business head of Office) left Microsoft to become the Nokia CEO, had the company dump their own mobile platform for Windows Phone, then when that failed closed to deal for Microsoft to buy their cratered mobile business.

In the interim, Microsoft built quite a few phones mostly with Samsung, HTC, and Huawei, but also oddball partners like Dell.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#64

Post by chaboud »

amelius wrote: post #24
wan23 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people on the revenue making teams aren't usually the ones who are let go.

The algorithms work. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

That statement, right there, should be the epitaph of every former great that found themselves disrupted.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#65

Post by deanCommie »

ethbr0 wrote: post #46
mike_d wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google should have never been in the cloud business to start with. It is a race to the bottom, and revenue depends on your ability to scale up staff - a model Google doesn't have in any of it's other businesses.

Anybody who's not Amazon didn't get into the cloud business for profit: they did it for survival. Post-AWS launch, writing was on that wall that amortizing your (already large) infrastructure costs across paying customers would be the only way to afford a certain scale and geographic distribution of hardware that was a prerequisite to taxing future value.

AWS was built from the ground up on new infrastructure. There was no reuse of existing Amazon infrastructure except tooling.

The whole "selling excess Q4 capacity" was a myth.

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/Amazon-web-services goes into it in great detail.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#66

Post by jahewson »

mike_d wrote: post #43
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should tell AWS about that race to the bottom while they continue to produce a majority of Amazon's profit.

Advertising is way more profitable than AWS. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasongoldberg/2022/02/04/amazon...

> While Amazon did not disclose the operating income generated from their ad business, it is almost certainly bigger than the income generated by AWS

Not exactly making a strong case.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#67

Post by jedberg »

> It has been widely reported that some of the firing was done by an algorithm.

It's ironic that the people who have now been directly affected by Google's penchant to allow AIs to make decisions with no recourse no longer work for Google and can not fix that problem.

Hopefully some of their colleagues finally realize that maybe having a human in the loop for termination decisions makes some sense, and we see fewer stories of gmail accounts getting shut off for no reason after 15 years with no recourse.

Ah, a man can dream.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#68

Post by bbor »

chaboud wrote: post #51
bbor wrote: post #36

As a google employee (who obviously has no privileged info) I really don’t buy this whole activist-investor explanation for the layoffs. Besides the fact that the investors in question own I’m much more convinced by the argument that they saw this sector-wide wave of layoffs as an opportunity to scare their engineers and change the culture to be a more intense, hierarchical one. Google engineering culture has long be…

It’s much easier to lose trust that to gain it, and the ramifications of the move will be felt for a very long time. There’s the time before and the time after, and Google won’t ever really look the same to the industry. That said, Google probably now actually looks more like what Google is and has been for some time. The industry was just hanging on to goodwill forged over the last two decades. There’s still massive…

Very good points, especially the last one: when trying to understand the logic behind these layoffs, I honestly haven’t considered incompetence enough. Surely people making tens of millions of dollars a year got there through intelligence and merit and not capitalist fiat? Right? Right…?

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#69

Post by CHY872 »

DefineOutside wrote: post #3
noorkersz wrote: post #2

step one: shift the focus from free software (liberty minded software) on to "open source" software. i.e. software which you can look but not touch. step two: profit

step one: promote BSD and MIT licenses over more copyleft licenses such as GPL step two: profit from people willing to code for enterprises for free There has to be some reason that Google released PyTorch under BSD-3 by Meta and TensorFlow being released under Apache by Google.

Ah, this is a bit of a false one. (A)GPL's pretty great for things that look like applications (or alternatively, pretty much anything GNU's ever made), but for anything looking like a library that is designed to be both free as in speech and free as in beer (Qt is the former but not the latter - want commercial usage? Pay us for a differently licensed edition!) it's a complete non-starter because it says that any usage of a library is a derivative work and infects. This is always going to be poisonous to any commercial use, and PyTorch and Tensorflow only gained the traction they have because they could be used commercially - they wouldn't have been successful if GPL'd.

Even LGPL is super challenging here due to requiring dynamic linking. This is fine in Java (unless you use Graal AOT compilation) and Python, impossible in Go, and at best discouraged in other compiled languages like Rust and C++.

I think there's likely a copyleft middle ground - something like the Mozilla public license seems about right, where it copylefts improvements without infecting users. I don't know why Google chose Apache 2.0 over MPL or the like - for something like Android it makes sense, for something like Guava it's not clearcut. But, when people talk copyleft, they're rarely, rarely talking MPL.

I think it's unlikely that Google opensourced Tensorflow with a view to getting some free dev hours, they're doing it to push their OSS agenda, to wield influence over how everyone else does work.

Re: What is Google doing with its open source teams?

#70

Post by jedberg »

AlbertCory wrote: post #10

I knew Chris DiBona quite well. While I don't know the whole community as well so this is a rash statement, it's hard to imagine anyone knowing more about open source than Chris does. And Chris, if you're reading this: you rock, man.

I've known Cat Allman (one of the other folks laid off) since we worked together 23 years ago. She's one of the kindest, most thoughtful people, and exceptional at her job. This is a huge loss for both Google and the Open Source community.

Knowing Cat I'm sure she'll land somewhere that let's her continue to be just as spectacular and involved as ever, but it's still is awful for her.

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